Hitachi has upped the ante for hard-drive manufacturers going into 2011 with their new line of Travelstar hard-drives, cramming 500GB into a 7mm package.

Shaving 2mm of the z-height of a hard-drive may not sound like very much, but with most standard consumer drives weighing in at 9.5mm, the Travelstar is officially the highest-capacity drive ever produced in the form-factor. Hitachi’s claims give the Travelstar line the highest gigabyte-per-cubic-millimetre ratio when compared to SSD, 9.5mm, 2.5in or 1.8in HDD. This more-efficient storage is paramount as laptop manufacturers continue to push for smaller and thinner hardware in their own right.

Travelstars will spin at 5,400rpm, have available capacities of 250GB, 320GB and 500GB and leverage the increasingly-used larger 4k sector size. Expect these drives to connect with SATA 3Gbps and ship with 8MB cache.

For their own products, Hitachi plans to remodel their line of G-Drive Slim USB external hard-drives with the new Travelstars for Q1 2011. In the meantime, you should start seeing standalone Travelstar Z5K500 drives before the end of the year.

According to IDC¹, 500GB, mobile 2.5-inch drives represent 22 percent of the market today, with this capacity growing 42 percent annually from 2010 to 2013. Offered in a complete family of 500GB, 320GB and 250GB, which satisfies more than 77 percent of today’s capacity needs in the portable PC market¹, these drives are the industry’s only second-generation family of 5,400 RPM, 7mm z-height drives, which are designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers. All this combined puts the new Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family in the industry sweet spot of opportunity in the mobile 2.5-inch market.

With its slim profile and high capacities, the Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family delivers the best cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3) when compared to solid state drives (SSD), and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch 9.5mm HDDs, offering a compelling value proposition for OEMs and system integrators. With the broadest line of 7,200 and 5,400 RPM 7mm drives now at their fingertips, Hitachi customers can differentiate product lines by utilizing space savings to produce thinner devices, add battery capacity, increase shock robustness, or improve internal airflow – all better uses of the volume in a system than shipping a partially “empty” 9.5mm 2.5-inch hard drive with only one disk.

Delivering the right balance of power and acoustics, the drives feature 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, and deliver a nearly silent operation at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels, which is quieter than most ambient noise in a household. All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface. They are also Hitachi’s second generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

All Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

Security, Reliability, Availability Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. When employing BDE, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. The Travelstar Z5K500 drive family will also be offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320GB and 500GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24×7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.

The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping to select distributors in December.

New 500GB Travelstar Z5K500 Enables Sleek, Elegant G-Technology G-DRIVE slim The G-Technology G-DRIVE slim leverages the new rugged, 7mm Travelstar Z5K500 drive, making it the thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch external hard drive in the world. With its ultra thin profile and sleek design that complements the Apple® Macbook®, MacBook™ Pro or Macbook Air™, users now have increased capacity in a stylish footprint to help them move, work and play with their digital content. Now at 500GB, the drive has enough room to store Up to 125 hours of high-definition video, 500 hours of standard video, 178 movies, 125,000 4-minute songs or 250 games². Formatted for Macs with simple plug n’ play connectivity, the G-DRIVE slim is Time Machine® ready for added backup protection. It is USB-powered, so there is no need to carry around an extra power cord.

The 500GB G-Technology G-DRIVE slim will be shipping to retailers in early Q1 2011. Pricing has not been set.

“Ultra thin and light devices are, without argument, a growing trend. In order for these innovative designs to live up to their true potential, they need rugged, reliable high-capacity hard drives that can withstand the rigors of a portable environment and satisfy the storage demands of their end users, and Hitachi continues to deliver,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST. “As the industry’s only 500GB one disk product and the only second generation 7mm product family, Hitachi continues to push the bar higher, and is leading the shift from 9.5mm 2.5-inch drives to 7mm 2.5-inch drives across a broad range of market segments.”

About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world’s most valued data. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, Hitachi GST provides high-value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. Hitachi GST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hitachigst.com. About Hitachi, Ltd. Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2009 (ended March 31, 2010) consolidated revenues totaled 8,968 billion yen ($96.4 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hitachi.com.

¹IDC WW 2010-2014 HDD Forecast Update, IDC Doc# 226082, December 2010. ²Actual storage may vary depending on the compression rate applied. Capacities may not be combined. One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting. Travelstar and G-DRIVE Slim are trademarks of Hitachi GST. Hitachi trademarks are authorized for use in countries and jurisdictions in which Hitachi has the right to market the brands. Hitachi is not liable for third parties’ unauthorized use of Hitachi trademarks. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

]]>http://www.mobilemag.com/2010/12/20/hitachi-travelstar-superslim-500gb-mobile-hard-drive-is-just-7mm/feed/0Review: Aleratec 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser hard disk drive duplicatorhttp://www.mobilemag.com/2010/05/21/review-aleratec-11-hdd-portacruiser-hard-disk-drive-duplicator/ http://www.mobilemag.com/2010/05/21/review-aleratec-11-hdd-portacruiser-hard-disk-drive-duplicator/#commentsFri, 21 May 2010 17:24:31 +0000http://www.mobilemag.com/?p=83925When I first saw Aleratec’s 1:1 harddrive PortaCruiser I was totally in awe. I thought, damn, if I had this thing back in the day I would have been the shop wizard in no time. My first impressions were that it was portable, so hey, were Mobile so we can definitely check it out. And it is portable, lightweight, and doesn’t take much other than a standard power plug to get it running. It has multiple interfaces for either an IDE harddrive, SATA, even USB 2.0 and can make perfect copies of the drives from any, to any, of the multiple interfaces. Basically what once needed a computer to duplicate with, can now be done standalone with a tiny device that will fit in your gear bag.

During my infancy of evolutionary computer tech-wizardry, being sculpted into the guru that I am today, I was a bench tech for a local computer service company in the town I grew up in. Repairing workstations and servers that came off the line was always a day in hell, finding which failed part was the cause of disaster was rarely an easy task with Windows NT. It was a godsend when the customer wanted an actual new computer and not their old beast repaired. This would only involve a data transfer, but the actual OS and applications would still have to be re-installed; customer data, documents and other business assets were backed up and transferred by another working system, then ultimately to the new system.

Work orders would come in with a dozen or so identical systems for various locations throughout the clients office. An entirely new office would sometimes call for 15-20 machines, this meant a lot of overtime, cardboard box unpacking, repetitive next, next, next, and “would you like to continue?” questions being answered from that cold, and lonely blue installation screen. At the time we never figured drive cloning to be an option, now that I think back it could have been easily done with a dedicated computer and some third-party software; but with the company billing out at $90 an hour I guess saving time wasn’t really a priority.

When I first saw Aleratec’s 1:1 harddrive PortaCruiser I was totally in awe. I thought, damn, if I had this thing back in the day I would have been the shop wizard in no time. My first impressions were that it was portable, so hey, were Mobile so we can definitely check it out. And it is portable, lightweight, and doesn’t take much other than a standard power plug to get it running. It has multiple interfaces for either an IDE harddrive, SATA, even USB 2.0 and can make perfect copies of the drives from any, to any, of the multiple interfaces. Basically what once needed a computer to duplicate with, can now be done standalone with a tiny device that will fit in your gear bag.

Aleratec 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser - Photo: Mobile Magazine

The Aleratec 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser – Hard Disk Drive Duplicator and RAID is an essential tool for building, upgrading and backing up computer hard drives. It requires no computer to run, eliminating the need to tie up a system for hours running dedicated software to duplicate a hard disk, or lugging one on site to service a customers machine. I wasn’t overly impressed by the speed. It sat at 55 MB/s in cloning mode; I was hoping for a bit of a faster transfer rate since I had matched Hitachi 7200RPM 2.5” SATA drives for my test, but this was a sector-by-sector clone so keep that in mind.

Bottom Line

The ability to make sector-by-sector backups and copies of RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD (Spanning) or Normal disk configurations is critical for computer technicians. Allowing you to “Compare, Prescan, and Erase” drives without a machine will definitely give your company and mobile technicians an advantage over competitors. The price of $250 isn’t bad considering it replaces an entire computer.

]]>http://www.mobilemag.com/2010/05/21/review-aleratec-11-hdd-portacruiser-hard-disk-drive-duplicator/feed/2Aleratec 1:1 PortaCruiser clones SATA harddrives sector by sectorhttp://www.mobilemag.com/2010/02/18/aleratec-11-portacruiser-clones-sata-harddrives-sector-by-sector/ http://www.mobilemag.com/2010/02/18/aleratec-11-portacruiser-clones-sata-harddrives-sector-by-sector/#commentsThu, 18 Feb 2010 16:11:02 +0000http://www.mobilemag.com/?p=70996Just released this week, Aleratec’s 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser is a portable, lightweight external hard disk drive duplicator that allows you to easily clone a 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA I/II hard disk drives for backing up. You can even clone from IDE to SATA or vice-versa. It includes a Dual Disk RAID Controller which allows for 2 drives to be hooked up simultaneously, connect it to your PC via USB and it becomes an external storage adapter. With support for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, Mac 10.3+, and Linux, you will have most of your bases covered.

If you’re an IT Technician or part of your companies hardware deployment team, nothing takes longer then setting up the software for each and every individual workstation. If your on a service call at a of clients remote location and they run into drive problems, its never an easy situation to backup all of their data before popping in a new drive.

Just released this week, Aleratec’s 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser is a portable, lightweight external hard disk drive duplicator that allows you to easily clone a 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA I/II hard disk drives for backing up. You can even clone from IDE to SATA or vice-versa. It includes a Dual Disk RAID Controller which allows for 2 drives to be hooked up simultaneously, connect it to your PC via USB and it becomes an external storage adapter. With support for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, Mac 10.3+, and Linux, you will have most of your bases covered.

A 2-line LCD display gives you access to the features, and important status information and processes. With one push of the button, the 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser start to clone the drive sector-by-sector process that includes disk partition and boot sector information.

Aleratec’a 1:1 HDD PortaCruiser weighs only 8 oz and has a pricetag of $249.